Neil Young- Harvest Nautilus half speed mastered TRUE Test pressing

$

101

This  record  came  from  our  personal collection 

Neil Young - Harvest Nautilus audiophile TRUE test pressing LP

Offered for sale is one of the rarest Neil Young albums you will ever see offered for sale: a TRUE test pressing of the already-rare Nautilus half-speed mastered audiophile pressing from circa 1982.

In the wake of the success of Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, several other companies emerged in the early 1980s to produce high-quality, limited-edition albums intended for the audiophile market. One such company was Nautilus, a short-lived company in southern California. Nautilus only released 50 or so albums in their brief history, though many of them were noteworthy: Crosby, Stills and Nash's first album, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy, and the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East are just a few of the titles they released. All are quite rare today and are genuine collectibles in their own right.

Each title in the Nautilus catalog was pressed from high-quality virgin vinyl, and most of their titles were half-speed mastered. Half speed mastering is a method of cutting the initial acetate where both the tape and the cutting lathe are run at half the normal speed, allowing the cutting head to cut a more accurate groove in the acetate. The finished product featured dead-quiet vinyl, with improved dynamics, better imaging, and tighter bass than traditional, mass-produced records.

Neil Young's seminal 1972 album Harvest was one of the later titles in the Nautilus catalog, and as such, was only available for a short time before the company went out of business. Copies of the Nautilus pressing of Harvest rarely turn up for sale; they represent what is perhaps the rarest commercially available album ever released by Neil Young.

AllMusic.com gave Harvest four and half stars, saying:

Neil Young's most popular album, Harvest benefited from the delay in its release (it took 18 months to complete due to Young's back injury), which whetted his audience's appetite, the disintegration of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Young's three erstwhile partners sang on the album, along with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), and most of all, a hit single. "Heart of Gold," released a month before Harvest, was already in the Top 40 when the LP hit the stores, and it soon topped the charts.

The copy offered for sale is different, however, as it is a TRUE test pressing of the Nautilus pressing, rather than one of the more common, but still quite rare stock copies or a promotional copy, labeled as a test pressing.

Test pressings are pre-production issues intended for in-house use only to test the integrity of the stampers and to make sure that the finished product will sound as intended. Typically, only a handful of test pressings of any record are manufactured, strictly for record company employees' use in evaluating what will become the finished product. While it is impossible to know how many copies of a test pressing of such albums exist, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that the quantity is less than 20.

We use the term "true" test pressing because Nautilus often released promotional copies of their albums that were labeled as test pressings, but really were simply promotional copies. The more common Nautilus "test pressings" came in printed covers and had printed labels with the name of the artist, the name of the album, and the song titles printed on them, along with the words "test pressing" They might have been labeled "test pressing", but they weren't; they were actually promotional copies and were shipped out to audio stores as such.

THE RECORD

This record is a TRUE test pressing and was intended only for in-house use to evaluate the integrity of the stampers and to make sure the record sounded as it was supposed to.

The label on this one is different; it simply says KM RECORDS, INC. at the top and TEST PRESSING below it, with no other print anywhere on the label. Someone has written the word "Harvest" on the A side label in pencil, probably just to remind themselves which record they had in their hands.

The record itself is a beautiful VG++, with just the slightest of scuffs from being removed from the plastic inner sleeve. We don't see any spindle marks on the label; it's doubtful that this record has been played more than two or three times.

Stamper numbers:

Side one: NR-44-A4
Side two: NR-44-B4

The letters KM are also stamped in the vinyl on each side.

This record is an original, American test pressing; it is not a counterfeit, reproduction, or import.

It is also a great, high-quality, analog recording and not an inferior digital remaster.

Please note that the labels appear to be white in the photo.  They are actually beige in color.

THE COVER

The cover is a generic white cover with no printing on it, aside from handwritten information in the upper left hand corner bearing the title and catalog number of the album:

Neil Young
"Harvest"
Nautilus NR-44

The cover, to the extent that it matters, is VG+ with just traces of wear.

We've had numerous promotional Nautilus LPs over the years that were labeled "test pressing" but this is the only example of a TRUE Nautilus test pressing that we have ever seen or have offered for sale. Nautilus seems to have pressed considerably fewer test pressings than their competitors, as the fact that they never turn up for sale will bear out.

This is, quite simply, one of the rarest Neil Young albums ever, and a great pressing of a terrific album. If you're either a Neil Young fan or an audiophile record collector, you'll likely never see another copy of this great album for sale.

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